“[Jeff Bezos] started Amazon.com, so named because search engines like Yahoo! listed categories in alphabetical order, putting Amazon near the top of the list.”
Isn’t online shopping wonderful? The magical one-click purchase, the “shopping cart,” the potential for free shipping, buying things without your parents knowing until the package arrives in the mail and you tell them there are no returns or exchanges? You can add a myriad things to your wish list, then distribute said list to everyone you know who has any likelihood of getting you a birthday present. You can get used textbooks for half off, including convenient annotations for use on tests. What can’t you do? Ooh, ooh, let me answer this one! Um, you can’t have any human interaction. Before you go on about how this really isn’t necessary, as you’ve lived for nine years in your basement with nothing but a computer to call “company,” let me say something. People matter almost as much as machines do. In fact, I would make the bold statement that people matter more than machines do. I know, daring, isn’t it? Besides, I personally like giving small businesses my patronage before they file for bankruptcy and are bought by Wal-Mart.
Amazon.com is a wonderful thing, and I am by no means claiming I never use it. I love Amazon. I do a lot of my shopping online. But I also like to see other members of my species while fumbling for my debit card. And swiping a card is so much easier than memorizing all those numbers and giving each one to some site called www.scameras.com.
Amazon.com is an equal opportunity employer. They hire people like this guy who have suffered severe media-related head injuries and think that loading boxes onto a forklift is the coolest thing ever.
(Photo courtesy of www.nytimes.com)
To link all this back to mass media, Amazon.com and other online retailers are putting small media-related chains out of business. For example, when I was born – in 1991 – there were 5,100 independent bookstores. Now, there are only 2,200. They also dropped from 31% to 12% market share between 1991 and 2009. Online book sales, however, constituted 21% to 30% of the market by 2008 (Media & Culture 2011). While online sellers are often cheaper, more convenient, and better-stocked than single-unit stores, they are also significantly more impersonal. In fact, they are infinitely more impersonal. Why? Because even 0.00000001 personal units is infinitely more than zero. That’s called math. The equation can be written as:
0.00000001 PU / 0 PU = { }
Division by zero has infinitely many answers, and, since that means it cannot be a function, which is how this equation is set up, the answer is undefined, and therefore there is no solution. By extrapolation, we see that the problem of online booksellers stealing market share away from good, honest independents has no solution. So there. Manifesto, OUT.
Media has converged here.
Powerful mojo, Zavier.
ReplyDeleteAgain - no VIDEO embeds?
Good work.
Have you read a book called THE LONG TAIL? Check it out - he explores the ways in which Amazon and others have used online retail to build businesses and profits - and I like the questions you raise here.
Bravo,
Dr. W
The video is under "Media has converged here." I thought that would be a good way to work around the aesthetics issue we had discussed. I've also had issues actually embedding the video.
ReplyDeleteI have not read that book, but it sounds like a good read. Does "The Long Tail" have anything to do with the Amazon arrow? Who is the author? Thanks for the recommendation.
~Jeremy
I see now what you are doing, Jeremy.
ReplyDeleteEXCELLENT it is, friend.
Chris Anderson is your author - let me know what you think...
Dr. W
Thanks. I'll look that book up.
ReplyDelete